


It's Not a Competition

by scioscribe



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Poisoning, Tasting for Poison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-02-23 07:37:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23708002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “First time for everything,” Ward said wearily.  “We get the dungeon with the tasting menu.”
Relationships: Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52
Collections: Flash In The Pan: A Food Flash Exchange





	It's Not a Competition

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glorious_spoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/gifts).



“First time for everything,” Ward said wearily. “We get the dungeon with the tasting menu.”

Their captors had carried in their dinner on a round silver tray and laid it down at their feet, ignoring Danny’s attempts to befriend them and Ward’s attempts to bribe them with a disinterest Ward would swear was almost smug—and he had reason to know.

“Why don’t you just rip the chain out of the wall?” Ward said.

Danny at least had the decency to look embarrassed. “I didn’t realize what they were doing until it was too late.” He lifted his right hand, which was caught in something that looked like a cross between an iron gauntlet and a fingerless glove. It closed around in his wrist in a shackle just like Ward’s, one with a reasonably long chain holding him to the wall, but it had metal braces that went the whole length of Danny’s palm and up onto his fingers, with the braces supporting crisscrossing panels of metal that kept Danny locked in a wave.

“You look like Robocop,” Ward said.

“I can’t make a fist,” Danny explained, wriggling his fingertips at Ward in some kind of bizarre demonstration. His face had turned a little pink. “I can’t summon the Fist if I can’t, you know, have a fist.”

“So do it with your other hand.”

“It takes unbelievable training to get the Fist to manifest in the nondominant hand—”

“Unbelievable.” Ward leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes.

“It’s not like I didn’t warn you, you know,” Danny said. “It’s _called_ the Iron Fist. It’s right there in the name.”

Ward decided not to dignify that with a response. Okay, so whoever had taken them—whoever had snatched them away from first clean sheets Ward had seen in weeks of off-road traveling—knew who Danny was, and they knew his powers a hell of a lot better than Ward did. This wasn’t some run-of-the-mill billionaire kidnapping borne of opportunity. At least that explained why everything was so weird: why, for one thing, he was looking at a polished silver catering tray loaded up with eleven separate dishes all sized down to fit on some little girl’s tea party table.

Maybe they’d just stumbled across clean sheets right before they’d gotten nabbed, but they’d been going to bed on empty stomachs, which meant some of this stuff looked pretty damn good.

“Well, it’s a step up from your standard American prison food,” he said, shifting forward enough to catch the tray with his fingertips and pull it the rest of the way towards them. “You want anything on here in particular, or just whatever’s closest? I thought I’d go with the bao—”

“Wait!”

Ward froze, his hand hovering an inch above the bun. “What?”

Danny had gone from sheepish to grim, his face almost pasty beneath a sheen of sweat. “You should let me taste everything first.”

He didn’t like wherever this was going. “Why.”

“In case it’s poisoned. I might have more resistance than you do, even if I can’t get at the Fist right now, and anyway, we ate all kinds of things in K’un-Lun—”

“Here’s an idea: if you think this stuff might be poisoned, why don’t we just _not eat it_?”

“Because we’re hungry,” Danny said quietly. “And if we’re going to get out of this, we need to keep our strength up. Just let me—"

Ward tore off a piece of the pork bun and popped it in his mouth before Danny could stop him. “Tastes like barbecue pork,” he said after a second. “And steamed bun, unsurprisingly. Give it a minute to see whether or not it’ll kill me.” In the meantime, he had to fight back the urge to eat the rest of it, especially as the smell of the pork rose up into the air.

Danny stared at him. “Ward, it makes _more sense_ for me to do it.”

“No, it doesn’t.” He checked his watch, but it was just a reflex at this point: it had gotten broken three days ago and he just kept wearing it because it had Joy’s inscription on the back. “How long does poison usually take to work?”

Danny leaned forward, making a grab for the tray, and Ward pulled it out of his reach.

“Dammit, Ward—”

“Okay, we’ll call that good. Why not? Here.” He tore off half the bun and stuffed it in his mouth before he tossed the rest to Danny, who clumsily caught it between his left hand and in his chest.

“This isn’t a competition,” Danny said.

“No, it’s cost-benefit analysis. It’s more worth my while to stop you from being poisoned than it is for you to stop _me_ from being poisoned.” And it was more worth his while to save Danny than to keep himself from dying, but he had some idea of how well it would go over if he pointed that out.

He looked over the rest of their options. It was like some kind of shitty around-the-world culinary tour, with tempura, meatballs, flatbread, chicken soaked in some kind of peanut sauce, and even something that looked like a fried apple pie.

He took the pie next just for the hell of it. It was just as good—whoever had picked out their menu had had some pretty pedestrian tastes, but the cook had known what they were doing. He licked a little bit of the sticky syrup, spicy and caramel-laced and not too sweet, off one of his fingers, and tried to think about the last time he’d had actual pie. Probably the last time he’d had a housekeeper instead of just a cleaning service.

Danny was studying him across the length of their dimly lit cell, and Ward wanted to get away from whatever was in that look; it hurt, it was a pain in the ass the way sobriety was a pain in the ass, because it wouldn’t just let him do whatever it was he wanted to do, because it acted like there was more in the world than failure and whatever you did to make the failure go away.

Danny finally said, “I can’t say I think too much of your cost-benefit analysis.”

“You didn’t go to business school,” Ward pointed out.

“True. I got my education in the school of hard knocks—the masters would knock me and Davos on our heads or shoulders with a stick if they thought we weren’t paying attention.”

“I don’t think I like your monks, Danny.”

“They had their moments.”

So had Harold, and he was living proof that that hadn’t meant much. Danny had deserved more than moments.

Ward spun the silver platter around on the floor. “Round and round she goes, where she stops… meatballs. You like meatballs.”

“Actually, I don’t think I’m hungry anymore.”

“Nice try.” The meatballs were held together by the kind of little bamboo skewer they put in cocktails sometimes. Ward slid one free and popped it in his mouth.

“I don’t want you doing this,” Danny said. “Ward, come on. Please.”

“You were going to do it.”

“I was going to do it because I have mystical superpowers and I used to have to eat insects! It’s not the same thing as—as you acting like— _Ward_!”

His foot had kicked out involuntarily, knocking the tray skittering across the floor; his whole body seemed to be pulling like a rubber band that would then snap back into place, sending him crashing down against the stones. He couldn’t stop convulsing. Hadn’t waited long enough, he thought numbly—he hadn’t waited long enough to find out if it was poison—and now Danny would—

Ward’s head struck the floor, and the whole cell seemed to blink out of existence for a second. When it came back, he got to find out that he’d bitten his tongue: that was fun. He did a couple more of those full body jerks, his muscles clenched so tightly it felt like they’d snap his bones, and he heard himself making some sound he couldn’t get to stop, even though it sounded weak, it sounded like hell, like he was dying.

Danny was yelling, half in Mandarin and half in English, calling for the guards to come back. “Whatever you want from me, you’re not getting it if something happens to him. He’s not the Iron Fist, he doesn’t have to be part of this. Get back here and _help_ him!” His voice seemed to tear at the end, something inside him ripping it in two.

Nobody came. Which was what Ward was used to, mostly. The Danny part, though: that was new. That was nice.

Because once it became apparent that the people who’d poisoned them weren’t interested in helping them out, Danny lowered his voice and started talking to Ward.

The seizures were dying down now, fading into shudders and spasms—gentler, a little, but still completely beyond his control. He couldn’t get his jaw to loosen up. 

And Danny couldn’t seem to _shut_ up. He’d scurried over on the floor to the maximum reach of his chain, stretching out until he could just graze Ward’s shoulder with his left hand.

“It’s okay,” Danny said, twisting his fingers in Ward’s sleeve. “Breathe with me if you can. Try to relax your body—I think tensing up just hurts you even more. I’m right here, and I’ve got you. Can you move over closer to me?”

He was at the end of his tether, too, just in the opposite direction, stretched away from Danny like the seizures were something contagious. He groaned and rolled, not realizing until the last second that he was more or less barreling over straight into Danny, who caught him, holding Ward’s that way, Ward’s sweat-soaked forehead pressed against Danny’s shoulder. It was goddamn embarrassing, or it would have been if he hadn’t still been shaking all over and if Danny hadn’t felt like the one solid thing in the world.

“You’re coming out of it. Whatever it was, you must not have gotten a big enough dose to be fatal. You’re going to be okay, seriously. We’re going to—like, thirty or forty years from now, we’re going to think this is hilarious. We’re going to sit around saying, ‘Remember that time you were poisoned by a meatball?’” Danny shifted, sitting up and moving Ward’s head so it was pillowed on his leg. He kept his hands firmly on Ward’s shoulders, the left one with the freed fingers rubbing in little circles.

Slowly, Ward’s body went slack, like whoever had been thrashing it around like a marionette had finally gotten exhausted. He felt his own control come back.

When he spoke, his voice was thick: “You don’t make a very good pillow.”

Danny laughed a little breathlessly. “Yeah, well, that’s just because you’re used to down-filled ones and Egyptian cotton sheets. I used to sleep on the ground with my head on a rock.”

He would never have survived Danny’s years in K’un-Lun. “How are you feeling?”

Danny blinked down at him. “How am _I_ feeling?”

“Yeah. I already know how I feel, I feel like shit. But if it was anything other than the meatball, then it’s just a matter of time before you—”

“It was the meatball,” Danny said. “Or whatever they used, I’m immune to it. I have to be. You’ve—Ward, you’ve been out of it all night.”

“All night?” He squinted, but the quality of the light in the room looked the same to him: as gray and meaningless as ever, mostly filtering in through the cracks around the door. But keeping some kind of faultless sense of time like a damn rooster seemed like the kind of thing Danny might have learned in between nights spent sleeping on stone pillows. “If you say so.” He closed his eyes. “That can’t have been fun for you.”

Danny chuckled, but then he said, “You can’t do that again, Ward. You can’t—risk your life so we can have _dim sum_.”

“You started it.”

“That’s your argument, seriously?”

“You said that you were going to do it,” Ward said. “I was fine with not eating. But if you were going to start grabbing food and being all _Danny_ about it, yeah. I wasn’t going to let you.” He opened his eyes again, trying to manage a glare that he was mostly too wiped out to produce. "You do crap like that all the time, for the record.”

“Huh.” Danny frowned. “Okay, we’ll make a deal, then. I won’t sign up to risk my life for _dim sum_ if you’ll concede that sometimes, maybe, it makes more sense for me to be the one who goes in first.”

“Trust me, when it comes to punching things, I’ll always let you go in first. I like watching people get their asses kicked. This—” He winced as he lifted his hand, waving it out to loosely encompass the room and the food that had splattered against the wall when he’d kicked the tray away. “This just didn’t qualify.” He cleared his throat. Time they got away from all the mushy stuff, right? “What happens now, by the way?”

“Now I meditate.”

“Wow,” Ward deadpanned. “You’re practically McQueen in _The Great Escape_.”

“If I meditate, there’s a chance I can channel my chi and redirect it so that…” He wriggled the fingers on his left hand, raising his eyebrows. “And then…”

Punching. That suited Ward just fine. “In that case, meditate away.”

"I tried it a little before," Danny said softly. "To see if I could get it to work so I could heal you. I couldn't concentrate enough." He exhaled hard, a little chuff of humorless laughter. "Not really the most relaxing time in our lives, was it?"

"And our lives are generally so relaxing," Ward said. He touched Danny's shoulder. He didn't know if there was a non-clumsy way to say that he was sort of flattered, honestly, that Danny couldn't meditate while he was having nonstop seizures. He was flattered but... not surprised, and the not being surprised thing could still actually surprise him.

In the end, Ward didn’t know how much meditation it took for Danny to get his clenched left fist to flare up like a firefly, but it was long enough for him to, against all odds, actually start to feel hungry again. Not that Danny ripping their chains right out of the wall and then wrenching the cuffs themselves off with his bare hands wasn’t a pretty good distraction from his growling stomach. Danny helped him up—Ward’s legs felt like overcooked noodles—and sheepdogged him out the door, scanning the long hall the two of them had to stumble down. Danny kept the Fist going, even though Ward knew it had to be sucking out energy, or chi, or whatever, that he couldn’t spare; he was clearly planning on whaling on anyone who so much as stepped out in front of them.

But there was nothing. Nobody.

“Invited us to an imprisonment and then ditched us,” Ward said. “That’s a little rude.” He put his hand on Danny’s raised fist, fingers slotting in between Danny’s knuckles. “Ease up. You’re gonna burn yourself out.”

Danny relaxed his hand, but every other part of him stayed tensed. He was breathing hard. “I don’t like this. Why would somebody do this? What would they even get out of it? There had to be a reason. If they just wanted us dead, they could have done it a lot more easily than this, and if they wanted some kind of—favor or something—they didn’t even ask.”

And their catering sucked. Ward didn’t know that he really cared—not right now, anyway—why any of it had happened; he just wanted to get out of this place. To him it all stank like his own soured sweat, like a bad gym. But as he turned to say something like that to Danny, he saw a hard glint up by the ceiling. A hard glint with a blinking red light underneath it.

“Danny.” He jerked his head in that direction. “We’re being watched.”

“What?” Danny followed his look.

“This is all probably being live-streamed somewhere,” Ward went on. “I’m guessing for a very particular audience of one.”

“Orson Randall.”

Ward shrugged. “He’s the only one I could think of. Not like we’re short on enemies, but…”

“Somebody who knows about the Iron Fist, somebody who might want to just test us, poke and prod at us to see what we’ll do, see what the Fist is capable of, what _we’re_ capable of. And somebody with money. Yeah.” He carefully leaned Ward up against the wall, leaving him propped there. “Two seconds. I’m just going to go see if there was one back in there.”

“If ninjas come, I’ll yell,” Ward said dryly.

Danny grinned, irrepressible despite having not had a decent meal or a single hour of sleep for the last day and a half. “Good rule of thumb.” He moved in a kind of shuffling—for Danny, slow—run back down the length of the hall. and Ward tried not to let his heartbeat speed up the instant Danny was out of his sight. Luckily, Danny had been accurate, and they really were only talking seconds.

And this part, at least, hadn’t been a trap. Nobody had jumped out of the wall to grab him the second Danny was gone.

“In there too?” Ward said as Danny came back.

Danny nodded.

“Hope you flipped it off.”

“Ripped it out of the wall.”

“Even better.”

* * *

They prioritized putting as much distance between them and the deserted Randall building as possible, which meant that they didn’t let themselves crash until sometime after midnight. It might even have been impressive if Ward thought they’d actually covered any amount of ground. Instead, Danny had been slowed up by having to drag him along. They were still in the middle of nowhere, with no hope of a decent restaurant being around the corner anytime soon. Ward was lightheaded by the time they stopped. Danny deposited him gently at the base of a tree and then pointed off into the distance.

“There should be a village over there. I’ll go find someone who will sell us some—”

“Danny. If Randall’s a power around here, any one of the people in that village could be in his pocket. Either we’re hiding out or we’re not, fine, but if you’re just going to go over there and announce us, I’m coming too. Might as well get to sleep in a real bed.”

Danny pursed his lips. “You’re right. We shouldn’t risk it. They’ll have gardens, though, maybe I can scrounge something up… Do you have any cash on you?”

“I thought you were scrounging, not buying,” Ward said, but he was already digging a mix of dollars and yuan out of his money belt.

“Whether the villagers are paid off by Randall or not, they’re still poor,” Danny said, taking the cash. “I’m not just going to take some of their produce and not leave some money behind. I’ll just do it… quietly.”

“Right. Not stealing. They’re just involuntarily selling you stuff.” His stomach reminded him that now wasn’t the best time to be an asshole, especially if it might cost him dinner. “That should be more than enough to pay for whatever you take. I’m sure it’s fine.”

He dozed off while Danny was away, and he didn’t wake up until Danny touched his shoulder, saying his name a couple times, his voice just on the edge of panic.

“I’m fine.” He struggled to sit up further, dragging his back against the tree bark. “Sorry. I guess I’m just still kind of out of it.”

“You were poisoned, and you’re starving and exhausted,” Danny said. “You don’t have to explain. Think you can eat something?”

“God, yes.” He added, a little awkwardly, “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He was still getting used to the fact that he _could_ , that it actually mattered.

“It’s okay, I’m just glad you’re all right. Hey, I made dinner.” He’d made a bundle out of his jacket, and now he let it fall open, showing their weird impromptu picnic.

Danny had brought back snow peas and radishes and bok choy, mostly, and while it wasn’t like a deconstructed salad was high on Ward’s list of filling meals, he was so hungry that he still thought every bite of it was one of the best things he’d ever tasted. He’d gone through enough of it to feel like a rabbit before he finally slowed down. He picked up a daikon radish, white like ivory, and polished it off carefully on his sleeve. He snapped it in two and held out half to Danny, not saying anything, and Danny took it and smiled. They ate it at the same time.


End file.
